Labour Party crowdsourcing digital policy ideas

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We’re less than a year away from the next general election and if we know anything, it is that politicians are pretty much uniformly completely out of touch with technology and how it should be used. Luckily – you might be able to help.

Labour Digital, a group of Labour Party bigwigs have created a website to crowdsource policy ideas – which works on a Reddit style “upvote” system – where ideas that have been submitted can be voted on by others, and the most popular being put forward to the policy people for consideration.

The group has listed a bunch of policy areas on the website homepage for consideration, including everything from “digital connectivity and inclusion” to “digital skills”, “economic growth” and the “digital citizen” – including specific nods to the “post-Snowden world”.

It appears the website hasn’t been online for very long with ideas not having too many votes (people aren’t apathetic about politics, surely?), but popular ideas so far include electronic voting, a plea to stop the draconian surveillance measures, and keeping datasets like postcode data in the public domain.

It’s a nice initiative, and you can contribute here – though whether Ed Miliband and the Labour high command will listen, we’re not so sure. Please do vote up our “Make Trials Fusion an Olympic Sport” suggestion just in case, though.